Tag: tips

Embedded systems must meet their real-time deadlines in order to function efficiently and as expected. No one likes to press a button and wait thirty seconds before the system finally responds. More importantly, safety critical systems need to meet their deadlines or else very bad things could happen, such as injury or death. There are … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 7 Tips for Meeting Real-time Deadlines

When I’m teaching “C Programming for Embedded Systems”, I’m often asked whether the ternary operator should be used or an if/else statement. Hidden behind the question is really the need to know whether the ternary operator is more efficient than if/else. One might think that compilers today would generate identical code. Let’s take a quick … Continue reading Ternary Operator versus the if/else statement …

Real-time operating systems (RTOSes) have become a critical component in many embedded systems. Transitioning from bare-metal scheduling to an RTOS can be tricky business. Here are seven tips to help make the transition easier. Tip #1 – Plan out your architecture first If you have never used UML or been big into software architectures, now … Continue reading 7 Tips for using an RTOS

In order to reuse and port embedded software it is absolutely imperative that the code be written without any ambiguity. In a previous post, “Understanding Portable Types” located here, the basics of portable types were discussed and how the common types of char, int and long may mean different things depending on the architecture and … Continue reading Embedded Basics – 5 Tips for using portable types